My beloved Pentium 133 with 92MB of RAM that faithfully ran this site has finally died (well the 1GB SCSI drive sounds like the actuator has come loose inside the drive). There may be a few broken bits around the place until I put the site completely back as it was. The hardware has been replaced with a Linksys NSLU2 and USB drive. Future memory tuning is in order for the processes as it must all squeeze in 32MB RAM.

With the replacement of the SGI Altix by a Sun Constellation, I have moved on from SGI and am actively looking for work.

Just got the Neil Young DVD "Heart of Gold". Brilliant. My favourite music movie is "Stop Makiing Sense". I have only just watched "Heart of Gold" so it would be premature to replace the former with the latter. One thing that is constant with these two movies is the director, Jonathon Demme. He has made a wonderful film that touched me deeply.

"Heart of Gold" put me in the lap of the performers without any feeling of discomfort. The lighting is nothing like I have seen in a popular music performance before. It was warm, bringing focus to the primary players while emphasising the efforts of the entire ensemble. The introduction was short enough so one was not wondering when the music was to start. It gives a sense of what is to be performed and an insight into the world of the musicians and their relationship to Neil. This is important because relationships are what is cherished most deeply in these songs and the camera work catches this in the faces of the players on the stage.

Neil Young is not a "nostalgia act" or one to play on past glory. Neil is deeply into the process of creating music. His "Prairie Wind" songs are insightful and carefully arranged. The credits show him playing "Old Laughing Lady" (from hist first album) on stage by himself to an empty Ryman Auditorium. His fresh rendition of the song truly completes this movie.

I will be starting on the first of June 2006 as the SGI man in Canberra at the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing. This is exciting as it not only involves supporting a large Altix supercomputer but I also will be liasing between SGI, APAC and other research organisations. My goal since starting my degree was to move out of the IT Security field and move into scientific computing/environmental sciences/modelling.

Lots of people ask the Chapter 11 question and my reply is that companies like Storage Technology have traded out of chapter 11. SGI has a good culture and good technology and I look forward to seeing it finding its way back in the marketplace.

A new website is available for proof reading unclassified defence-related documents. Go to Staff Officer
for proof reading of your urgent documents.

Got busy after LCA 2005. Have created a patch to pwgen-2.03 to allow for "special" characters to be generated. This was in response to a colleague's request for the inclusion of non-alphanumeric characters in randomly generated passwords. See ftp.adavid.com.au/pub/pwgen-2.03-ad/. I passed it on to Ted T'so but haven't heard anything yet. Not one of his high profile projects.

After five and a half years I have left AnswerZ. Sad, but time to move on. Here is my updated resume in PDF form.

A coincidence - really - is that Leonie and I are now distributors of OneGroup Certified Organic Products.

On another occasion Gandhi wrote, It is not the Hindu religion, which
I certainly prize above all other religions, but the religion which
transcenscends Hinduism, which changes ones very nature, which binds one
indissolubly to the truth within, and which ever purifies. It is the
permanent element in human nature which counts no cost too great in
order to find full expression and which leaves the soul utterly
restless until it has found itself, known its Maker, and appreciated
the true correspondence between the Maker and itself.

Looking for reliable, responsive Proofreading or Editing? FishReading can turn around most documents within 24 hours. I am responsible for the PHP and Perl coding.

After finding myself whinging a little too much about politics, I have decided to make a difference. I have joined the Australian Democrats and will be standing for the seat of Ginninderra in the ACT Legislative Assembly elections. I am also involved in the Abolish the States Collective and delivered a paper at the inaugural Abolish the States Congress at the Australian Parliament House on June 22nd 2001.

Tom's web site, has been taken down. Turns out the name was similar to
an existing TradeMark.

Daytime activities

I have joined AnswerZ and my main assignment is looking after the Internet Gateway servers at DEWRSB (Aus Govt Department) I now have a slightly out-of-date resume if you are look for a Junior Unix Systems Administrator in Canberra, Alexander Wykes, a highly talented Administrator, is available for short term and part-time contracts. Call me on my mobile: 0414 581385

The Dark House

My friend John Teagle has just self-published and excellent book called "The Dark House". It has recently been favourably reviewed by the Canberra Times. It is a fictional story of a group of people's journey of discovery regarding links between the "paranormal" and the "normal".

Australian Net Censorship

I am embarrassed to be an Australian Netizen. Our simple-minded politicians have enacted a Internet Censorship bill that rivals China, Saudi Arabia and Iran in it's expression of a myopic view of the world. Here is an example of the insanity that Senator Richard Alston holds up as a model filtered search engine. I have discovered the real Truth of this by investigating here

Window Maker

Looking for a Window Manager?, check out Window Maker. Everyone here uses it

In order for this graph and this graph to continue
to follow the Perl rules and the Linux rules, I beseech you to heed the advice. There are more objective measurements of server popularity and semi-objective measurements of browser popularity available.

If you have a few spare CPU cycles, why not contribute them to the Bovine Project. Better yet, join The Australian Dudes" distributed computing team. I concentrate primarily on the Optimal Golumb Ruler project. Golumb rulers are interesting, not just for their mathematical beauty, but thet are used in astrophysics (eg spacing out a series of radio telescopes)

Family on the Web

My son and my daughters are in the throes of writing up their
own web pages. I want them to get to know what goes on behind the
scenes when they clickety-clack around the world. They started editing them
with vi(1), then they graduated to emacs(1). If they are good,
I will set up their accounts so they can use GNU Emacs with X!

Clare got to use Netscape Composer. I bet the other two don't dump all the crazy tags into their pages in the same fashion that Netscape dumped tags into Clare's page.

Tom graduated to emacs and has created his masterpiece. He also uses GIMP extensively .(He also got me to add a Playstation v Nintendo Rules/Sucks O' Meter) Tom reckons my page is really sad, especially my background!!! He reckons it looks like vomit :)

I learned to type on a card punch machine. "Kids these days,
you tell them about how hard it was in the good old days, and they
don't believe you!"

Rugby - The game played in heaven

ACT Veteran's Rugby is open to all who are 35 years and over and who want to play Rugby. The level of skills amongst us varies considerably but we do put together some impressive football to satisfy our 20 odd spectators :-)
. We have ex-club players, ex-rep and an ex-International or two have been known to run around the paddock with us. We have a number of players who have never played Rugby before (Aussie Rules - me for instance -, Soccer, League and TV).

In my spare time, (cough, cough) I wander around sites such as

and David Low. These pages has pointers to
some great gaming resources, including those they have authored themselves.